Major Issues

The Selection and Payment of Corporate Auditors by Corporate Management

The Involvement of Auditing Firms in Consulting Contracts with
Their Clients

Political Influence on Accounting Standards

The Ability of Corporations to Distort the Perception of Financial
Reality with Accounting Tricks

Pressures from Congress to Curb the Oversight Function of Public
Agencies Such as the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC)

Pressures on Congress to Protect the Accounting Industry from
Civil Suits

The Costing of Stock Option Compensation of Employees

There are two related problems here. First, what should be the
treatment of stock options for making accounting figures representative
of the financial state of the company? Second, does the non-expensiving
of stock options result in not only over-compensation of executives but
also give them an incentive to go to any lengths to raise the price
of the company stock even if it involves lying and cooking the books.
As Richard Breeden, a former SEC Chairman (1989-1993) has said:

You have executives in
many companies who have- measure their option packages in millions of
shares, and sometimes tens of millions of shares. And with that, of
course, grows a pressure to make the stock perform at higher levels.

When an executive has a portfolio of a hundred
million stock options, they can make far more money by getting the stock
to move a few dollars in response to false information than anybody could
do in most insider trader cases.

So the size of the stock
packages create a temptation for economic gain that is very corrosive and
will lead some people to be willing to lie, to cook up false income, to
not tell the truth about negative factors, and in Enron's case, to create
an entire picture of a company that didn't exist.

This sentiment is echoed by Sarah Teslik of the Council of Institutional
Investors:

At Enron the
executives had the ability, by jacking up the stock price, to take
hundreds of millions of dollars out of the company and keep them through
the vehicle of stock options.

Stock options should be charged to earnings. They are
often a massive cost of production, and they need to show up in the
financials in a very clear way, so that someone investing in the company
today doesn't miss the fact that a couple years down the line, their stock
is suddenly going to be diluted massively and be much less valuable.

When the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) ruled in 1993
that stock options should be expensed there was wide-spread corporate
outcry particularly in the Silicon Valley. Hedrick Smith, in his
Frontline Special Bigger Than Enron, remarked:

Corporate America was livid because making options a
business expense would be devastating to the bottom line of many
companies. At Internet dynamo Cisco, for example, a $2.6 billion profit
one year would have been cut nearly in half. A Merrill Lynch study found
that expensing options would have slashed profits among leading high-tech
companies by an average of 60 percent.

But options were a hidden cost that never showed up
on a company's balance sheet, and that made it harder for ordinary
investors to gauge corporate performance.

The FASB thought that it was a clearcut matter of truth. As
Jim Leisenring the Vice Chairman of FASB from 1988 to 2000 stated:

The costs are
fairly significant, and we think that this is a credibility issue, that,
in fact, financial statements are omitting compensation expense, for some
companies very material amounts of compensation expense. So we thought and
still believe that it's a matter of the marketplace deserves that
information.

But the industry was not interested in the objective truth of the matter.
It was a question of their pocketbooks that mattered. A grassroots compaign
swept industry. As Mark Nebergall, a software industry lobbyist, described
the situation:

People were signing petitions to the president
saying, you know, "Please don't let them do this. Don't take away my stock
options." People were hot under the collar.

People had on T-shirts with big stop sign on the front that said "Stop FASB" that
they were passing out.

CEO's from all over American industry traveled to Washington to personally
lobby their congressmen and senators. Sarah Teslik of the Council of
Institutional Investors described the campaign:

It was one of the
most impressive lobbying efforts on earth. It was protecting CEOs' pay
packages.

I mean, there's nothing in CEOs' salaries that
compares to the numbers of CEO stock options. It was protecting CEOs' pay
package. They were out in force.

The campaign was effective. In May of 1994 the Senate voted 88 to 9 to
condemn the FASB resolution.
Jim Leisenring of the FASB described the nature of the Senate's action:

It wasn't an accounting debate. We switched talking
from about whether, "Have we accurately measured the option?" to things
like, "Western civilization will not exist without stock options," or that
there won't be jobs anymore for people without job- without stock options.
People tried to take the argument away from the accounting and over to be
just plainly a political argument.

The Senate did not have the power to
force the FASB to rescind their resolution but the Senators could take away the
funding of the FASB. This was a serious threat to the functioning of the
FASB.
Arthur Levitt the Chairman of the SEC at the time got involved. He explained
his actions as follows:

My concern was that if Congress put through a law
that muzzled FASB, that would kill independent standard-setting. So I went
to FASB at that time, and I urged them not to go ahead with the rule
proposal.

It was probably the single biggest mistake I made in
my years at the SEC.

The FASB relented and passed a much weaker rule that the cost of
stock options need only be revealed in a footnote in corporate reports.

A complicating factor is that many companies count stock options as an
expense for tax purposes but do deduct them in reporting corporate
earnings.

Three Case Studies in the Ability of Corporations to Distort the Perception of Financial
Reality with Accounting Tricks

Sunbeam

Sunbeam was an old, well known maker of household appliances. By 1996 it
had fallen on tough times. The major stockholder brought in Al Dunlap
to manage the company. Dunlap was known as a turnaround artist with
a record of rescuing failing corporations. He was given 7 million shares
and options so he had a high incentive to improve the financial status
of the company. That was the general idea but actually what his incentive
was was to increase the stock price. By 1997 he reduced the number of
Sunbeam appliance factories from 26 to 8 and sold off businesses that
fit well with the core business. He claimed to have cut costs by
$225 million a year. Wallstreet heard and believed. The stock price
rose from $12.50 per share to $53.

But all was not as it appeared to be. Much of the supposed turnaround
came from taking an exaggerated writeoffs for the year 1996 in which Dunlap
took over, $336 million. This writeoff turned $100 million of earnings into
a loss of $230 million for the year. That made it easy to appear to
have improved the fortunes of the company. This was combined with dubious
accounting ploys. In fact, however, the company was not really doing better.
In 1998 the general councel for Sunbeam met with several members of the
Board of Directors. John Byrne reported in Business Week that the
counsel told the board members:

Al [Dunlap] didn't tell you the
truth. The quarter is coming in horribly. The numbers are a disgrace- new
products that have no sales, inventory issues, accounting issues." And the
board decides to fire both Al and the chief financial officer.

The price of the stock subsequently collapsed, not back to the $12.50
a share that it had been at before Dunlap came in, but to less than $1.
The SEC brought charges against the Arthur Andersen auditor that failed
to blow the whistle on the flaws in Dunlap's accounting. The case may still
be pending because of limitations on the resources of the SEC. One was
the regulated industries try to cope with regulation is to use political
influence to have legislatures deprive the regulatory agencies of funding.

Waste Management

Waste Management is a familiar name around America because in many cities
it is the company that collect the trash and garbage. Its name is
blazoned on the big trash trucks that roam the cities. Waste Management
bought up smaller trash-collecting companies and established a record
of high growth in earnings simply from those acquisition. When it was
no long feasible to boost earnings by buying more trash companies because
they were not that many left the company resorted to accounting ploys to
inflate earnings.

Companies compute depreciation because depreciation is deductible for
tax purposes. High depreciation reduces the profit tax and thus
enhances the cash flow of the corporation. The after-tax profit
is lower when depreciation is higher. Usually corporation want to
expense capital goods over as short of a period as allowed. Apparently
Waste Management began extending the depreciation period on its
equipment to increase its current after-tax profits even though this
action reduced its cash flow. When new members joined Waste Management's
board of directors they found that the company had inflated its
earnings by $1.7 billion by such accounting ploys.
Waste Management's auditor Arthur
Andersen had not objected to the company's accounting practices and
the SEC fined Arthur Andersen $7 million and had the accounting firm sign an agreement that it would
not sanction such accounting in the future. However some of Arthur
Andersen' clients were paying as much as $100 million per year in fees
for auditing and consulting so a $7 million fine was not much of an
incentive to stop doing the things that its clients wanted it to do.

Enron

In Enron's case the accounting ploy was the creation of partnerships
so that corporate debt could be taken off the balance sheet in order
to make the company look better financially than it really was. Its
accounting firm, Arthur Andersen, not only did not object to this
strategy in its audits, it helped create the strategy. There were
staff members at Arthur Andersen, such as Carl Bass, who did object
to the accounting ploys buts the client, Enron, demanded that Bass
be taken off their audit program.

One of the vice-presidents of Enron, Sherron Watkins, who was a former
professional employee of Arthur Andersen, warned the CEO Ken Lay that
Enron was on the verge of financial collapse but nothing was done. Later
Watkins notified Arthur Andersen of the accounting problems and when
the accounts were corrected Enron's net worth was reduced by $1.2 billion.
Subsequently the stock price collapsed and the company went folded.

The CEO of Andersen Worldwide, Joseph Berardino, had a witty
comment on the situation. He said,

You know there's been so much pain that's coming
out of this Enron situation- stockholders, their employees, now our
employees. People always ask me, "How do you sleep at night?" And I say,
"I sleep like a baby. I wake up every two hours and cry."

In an interview for the Fontline Special Bigger Than Enron
Hedrick Smith had the following exchange with Lynn Turner, who was the chief accountant with the SEC
but formerly had been a partner in the accounting frim of Coopers & Lybrand.

LYNN TURNER: In my prior life, we [Coopers & Lybrand] actually had a retainer
arrangement with each of the major Wall Street investment banking firms
under which we would help them financially engineer or structure
hypothetical transactions for, you know, finding financing, keeping it off
balance sheet, making companies look better than, quite frankly, they
really were.

HEDRICK SMITH: You mean, doing the kinds of
things that Enron and Andersen did.

LYNN TURNER: Yes. Exactly.

HEDRICK SMITH: So there's a whole system that does this.

LYNN TURNER: There is a system that turns around and does it. Every
one of the big accounting firms have such a group.

HEDRICK SMITH: And all the big investment banks have that.

LYNN TURNER: Yes, investment banking groups. In fact, they make
good money trying to figure out how to structure these transactions.

HEDRICK SMITH: So we haven't, in Enron, just stumbled into
something that may have happened. This isn't way off, an
odd-ball thing.
We've run into something that is a fairly common practice.

LYNN TURNER: This is day-to-day
business operations in accounting firms and on Wall Street. There is
nothing extraordinary, nothing unusual in that respect, with respect to
Enron.